Communism and the end of architecture?

If art and architecture are unavoidably stamped the ideological socioeconomic process by which they were created (i.e. bourgeois architecture, socialist architecutre, etc), what happens when communism is reached and there is no class conflict to determine architectural form or requirement?

Obviously under bourgeois architecture we see buildings designed and built for the rich as oppulent, spacious and eye-catching in an attempt to announce and preserve their status in society. At the same time, proletarian buildings are small, uniform, repressive and thus also reflective of the proletariat's position within society.

Socialist architecture sees a reaction against bourgeois architecture, whilst attempting to improve that of the proletariat's dwellings in terms of function and quality. At the same time however, the conformity to a lack of individualism as seen in bourgeois proletarian housing is retained (as part of the reaction against the individualism for those in power manifest in bourgeois architecture).

With communism the class struggle is over and there is no previous class architecture to react against. What stimulates architecture to evolve on a functional basis if socioeconomic conditions are no longer progessing dialectically?

Eh, I dunno, maybe people will just live in nice houses? What's "nice" being determined by the respective inhabitants of course - but without any political implication, whether conscious or not, because politics will be gone.

I strongly suggest you to read Umberto Eco's The Abstent Structure, which has a section devoted to architecture. For Eco, architecture is an ideological rhetoric of space.

The question of space and urbanism is reviewed more in depth by Herni Lefervbre's "The Production of Space", which is still considered a milestone by many social scientists. Basically, space is a social creation, and the need for a market, for a uniform space to carry out transactions, leads to the establishment of an empty Cartesian space which is then "filled" by our commodities. This uniform space, however, does not match our real place, the one of production, not circulation. Socialism should bring a bigger focus on place, rather than space, and so on the creation of heteronomous space, not uniform.

How this more localized, free space is represented architecturally(ideologically) is a good question. I suppose we might see a greater simplicity, as our produced space will be a direct representation of our needs, but without the imposed uniformity of ratio-domination.

Whether ideology will indeed be overcome under communism, or if its a constituitive aspect of our reality-forming, is an open question, and so, I would think, is the end of architecture.

"You say you have no enemies? How is this so? Have you never spoken the truth, never loved justice?" - Santiago Ramón y CajalForum Rules

With communism the class struggle is over and there is no previous class architecture to react against. What stimulates architecture to evolve on a functional basis if socioeconomic conditions are no longer progessing dialectically?

Well, class struggle has been the fuel of history up to the present and into socialism, but in communism, even though it will cease to play a role, the real freedom that wil become open for mankind to write its own history will make what has happened before a "prehistory", and what is to come the real history as such.

Thus, you wouldn't get an "end of history" and an end to progression.

"You say you have no enemies? How is this so? Have you never spoken the truth, never loved justice?" - Santiago Ramón y CajalForum Rules